“One Health” or Three? Publication Silos Among the One Health Disciplines

• Published in: PLoS biology Vol. 14; no. 4; p. e1002448
• Main Authors: Manlove, Kezia R, Walker, Josephine G, Craft, Meggan E, Huyvaert, Kathryn P, Joseph, Maxwell B, Miller, Ryan S, Nol, Pauline, Patyk, Kelly A, O'Brien, Daniel, Walsh, Daniel P, Cross, Paul C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 21.04.2016; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Authorship; Biology and Life Sciences; Collaboration; Cooperative Behavior; Ecologists; Ecology; Ecology and Environmental Sciences; Environmental health; Federal funding; Generalized linear models; Infectious diseases; Interdisciplinary aspects; Interdisciplinary research; Medical research; Medicine and Health Sciences; Meta; Methods; Objectives; Publishing; Researchers; Scholarly publishing; Social network analysis; Social networks; Studies; Veterinarians
• ISSN: 1545-7885; 1544-9173; 1545-7885
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002448

The One Health initiative is a global effort fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to address challenges in human, animal, and environmental health. While One Health has received considerable press, its benefits remain unclear because its effects have not been quantitatively described. We systematically surveyed the published literature and used social network analysis to measure interdisciplinarity in One Health studies constructing dynamic pathogen transmission models. The number of publications fulfilling our search criteria increased by 14.6% per year, which is faster than growth rates for life sciences as a whole and for most biology subdisciplines. Surveyed publications clustered into three communities: one used by ecologists, one used by veterinarians, and a third diverse-authorship community used by population biologists, mathematicians, epidemiologists, and experts in human health. Overlap between these communities increased through time in terms of author number, diversity of co-author affiliations, and diversity of citations. However, communities continue to differ in the systems studied, questions asked, and methods employed. While the infectious disease research community has made significant progress toward integrating its participating disciplines, some segregation—especially along the veterinary/ecological research interface—remains.